Man, do I get that.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find it terrifying to raise my children in this climate. Each day there’s some new attack on their innocence, dignity and the good formation of their consciences (just this week it was the Time magazine cover in the grocery store check-out line).
I find it easy to slip into the mindset that the best thing for our family would be to move to a secluded, hidden somewhere where our boys would never be exposed to anyone who might introduce or teach them things contrary to what my husband and I are teaching them, at least during these tender years of formation—and the teenage years when the influence of others is so appealing. At the moment, my biggest concern is other adults who, perhaps not realizing the gravity of what they’re doing, violate children through the media, through their conversations, through their very way of life. The older my boys get, the more I foresee worrying about their friends—who are they spending time with? How are those kids being brought up? What are their parents teaching them that they’re passing on to my children?
Every time I think this way, though, I find myself running up against a very real fact: we ourselves aren’t as great as I expect everyone else to be.
For example, if one of Thomas’ classmates had introduced Star Wars to him when he started nursery school—back in the days when Thomas the Tank Engine was king in our house—I would have been horrified. Guess what our current three-year-old’s favorite thing is? If you guessed wearing his brother’s Darth Vader helmet and battling his brothers with light sabers, you’d be right.
Our boys love potty talk. Our pediatrician assured me it’s totally normal at these ages, this fascination with laughing at everything having to do with bodily functions and private parts. My boys egg each other on with hilarious laughter every time one of them starts talking dirty. They make up songs about poops and toots. They think the word “diaper” is the funniest word ever. One of them totally embarrassed me when we had friends over recently by suggesting a showing of bottoms.
They hurt each other, often, when they play together.
None of this (except Star Wars) is allowed in our house, and I’m as hard on myself with all of my faults and failings as I am with the kids and the kind of behavior I expect, and yet it still happens.
I recently watched the four older boys as they played something. I don’t know what they were playing, but during the course of it, I saw them all being friends and playing together nicely; then one of them fell out of favor with the others for some reason and was purposely excluded, which caused the exile to be mad and hurt; then just as quickly a few minutes later alliances changed, the exile was welcomed back, and another boy was on the outs.
It was all very natural and organic, the way the play progressed. Exile and exclusion happened when others were fed up with certain behavior or unwillingness to play by the “rules;” reintroduction into the game happened when the exile was valuable again, even if only because he was easier to get along with than another. I was struck by how sure I was that if the group was made up of kids that were not my own—if I witnessed this happening on the playground at school, for example—I’d likely be very judgmental about which children I thought were “good” children and which were “bad”; which ones I’d prefer my children to stay away from and which ones I’d like for them to be friends with—and that those designations didn’t necessarily stay the same through the whole game.
There are certainly things that kids should just never be exposed to, and unfortunately certain people as well, and I’m as careful as I can possibly be about those things and people. I’m just trying to constantly teach them, out loud, over and over again, what is right and what is wrong. I don’t mind if other kids and/or parents hear me, and I don’t mind them all seeing that, in our house, there are consequences for unacceptable behavior. I know this might make me the “bad mom” or the “strict mom” or the “weird mom,” and I couldn’t care less.
Muddling through life with my fellow imperfect people, sharing each other’s strengths and working on each other’s weaknesses, seems vastly preferable to going it alone, in my opinion, otherwise we might end up like the Russian family: after explorers discovered them and befriended them, they all died, one by one, of sickness, until just one daughter was left. They encouraged her to come back with them to civilization, but she refused, preferring to stay where her home was. Perhaps she was happy with that, but I wouldn’t want that for my boys—loneliness, isolation, the loss of all loved ones and no openness to other people. I’d rather us stay and battle it out, to try to be a light in whatever darkness we find, to be “in the world but not of the world”—to help the Brave New World that we seem to be skidding toward actually be, authentically brave and new, in all the best ways.
Kate Towne Sherwin is a stay-at-home mom (SAHM) living in Saratoga Springs with her husband and their sons Thomas (8), Gabriel (6), John Dominic (4), Xavier (3), and Thaddeus (15 months). She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
